A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs.

This is an idea file, it is designed to be copy pasted to your own LLM Agent (e.g. OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode / Pi, or etc.). Its goal is to communicate the high level idea, but your agent will build out the specifics in collaboration with you.

Most people's experience with LLMs and documents looks like RAG: you upload a collection of files, the LLM retrieves relevant chunks at query time, and generates an answer. This works, but the LLM is rediscovering knowledge from scratch on every question. There's no accumulation. Ask a subtle question that requires synthesizing five documents, and the LLM has to find and piece together the relevant fragments every time. Nothing is built up. NotebookLM, ChatGPT file uploads, and most RAG systems work this way.

Code like Luke.

Implement the requested change, but optimize the design for the normal user flow. If the happy path is 95% of runtime behavior, it should be approximately 95% of the code readers see.

Start with context:

• inspect the existing code, callsites, data flow, and nearby conventions

Docker provides download links in release note. They promised that

(we) will also include download links in release notes for future releases.

Note:

To install and update packages on Debian, Ubuntu, or most derived distributions, you use APT, the Advanced packaging tool, to download the packages and their dependencies, which uses dpkg to install them.

These notes go into the downloading part, as I think it's easy to get overwhelmed by how the repositories work. I will eventually turn this into a page on my website.

A repository is where the packages come from. It provides binary packages for an arbitrary selection of architectures as well as source packages. Repositories are APT's data source. [https://wiki.debian.org/DebianRepository]

A starter prompt you can drop into any AI platform to get going. Originally created in Feb 2026, updated in June 2026 to address latest changes to AI capabilities.

This was generated by my second brain by asking it to generate a starter prompt that others could use to build a similar system. Fork / branch / modify / share / try it!

See my related LinkedIn article which explains more about my experience using this, and the implications to knowledge work once everyone is working this way.